We just scanned about 7000 photographs of our own, and inheritted from previous generations. The photographs weighed about 70#. Although the scanner came with what appeared to be a stuck pixel, a few cleanings finally cleared it. At that stage the scanning went very smoothly. Only rarely did we need to clean the scanner. We used the recommended ""Standard"" scan profile with a medium jpeg compression of ""3"". There was barely noticable degradation of the image. By barely, I mean magnifying the jpeg until an eyeball (of someone in the photograph) is about 1"" on the computer monitor and comparing it to the paper photograph using a physical magnifying glass. Turns out that the physical ""prints"" we received from our film cameras aren't so good anyway. And that applies to about 20 different film processors from 1940 to 2003. The beauty of the ""Standard"" profile setting is that a 4x6 or 5x7 photo scans in about 2 seconds. It takes about that long to get the next photo ready to scan, so that's about as fast as humanly possible anyway. Finally we got rid of all this stuff. What a relief.